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“... in Venice or attracted a Defoe or a Camus. Its victims, mostly children, have gone to their early graves anonymously, so there have been no stories to tell. As for the researches and discoveries of the scientists who have worked on it, they have failed to stimulate celebratory writings for the general public, despite their importance, their originality and ...”

“... people; the medics in Kiev and Moscow Hospital 6 who attended the injured and irradiated; and Dr Robert Gale, the American surgeon who joined them. You have Mikhail Gorbachev, the charismatic, controversial Soviet leader, castigated for remaining silent from 26 April to 14 May, who nevertheless seized on the Chernobyl accident to add powerful impetus to his ...”

“... may object that Arthur Scargill and Peter Heathfield made rods for their own backs, dug their own graves, committed various sins of hubris and all the rest of it. Milne himself takes an honest and open line in favour of the NUM’s all-out strategy for the defence of the coalfields and the union, which he regards as being virtually identical. But his ...”

“... than a coffee table without legs. Its credits ape a blockbuster movie’s: ‘Executive Producer: Robert Gottlieb – Associate Producer: Martha Kaplan’, etc; and its first page opens like cinema curtains on a wider-than-Panavision main title modelled on Gone with the Wind. A good half of the book is pictorial ...”

“... to save as many men as possible from the horrors of the ‘hand-made railway’. The admirable Dr Robert Hardie, who served in Changi gaol, wrote in The Burma-Siam Railway: ‘I used to think that after these experiences I would never be able to tell the truth plainly again.’ And so to that midnight hour in the guardroom, when Lieutenant Lomax removed his ...”

“... once saw Eric as the ideal baptismal name, to the ultimate dismay of its recipients. Of Eric Gill, Robert Speaight says that being called Eric ‘might not unfairly be described as starting life with a handicap’. The Great War showed what handicapped Erics were made of; in 1918 my cousin Eric, up from Biggin Hill in a two-seater fighter, overhauled ...”

“... before he knew that the FBI had seized all Black’s hard disks: Deedes, indeed, is a bit like Robert Graves’s Claudius, surviving every situation while more powerful figures are pole-axed all around him because he plays the buffoon so successfully that no one can see in him a future emperor. Born in 1913, Deedes grew up in a castle that was sold ...”

“... of years, but with little to impress tourists despite being the site of a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery. At the end of a path lined with cypress trees a rectangle of clipped lawn is enclosed by low grey stone walls. Some 356 British soldiers and airmen of the First World War are buried here, the ...”

“... I wonder what you think of these?’Tolkien wrote many letters to his Catholic correspondents, Robert Murray, a Jesuit priest, and Peter Hastings, who owned a religious bookshop in Oxford, attempting to prove that this fake universe he had constructed was neither heretical nor blasphemous but entirely harmonious with orthodox theology. Where had orcs come ...”

“... Extracts, or pericopes – to borrow his typically ornate term – from Robert Craft’s diary of his years with Stravinsky first appeared in the famous series of their conversation books issued throughout the Sixties. In 1972, after the composer’s death, a far bigger selection was published as Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, 1948-1971 ...”

“... environment for them seventy years later. Indeed, when the classical Greeks discovered Geometric graves and tombs they not only failed to connect them with their greatest poet, but denied they were Greek at all. The more we find out about Homer’s period, the more his poetry comes as a surprise. With so little information coming from elsewhere, our only ...”

“... got it right: she had seen it all before under the microscope.In​ 1827, the Scottish botanist Robert Brown undertook an investigation into the pollen of Clarkia pulchella, a straggly plant with slender pale purple petals that splay out like chicken feet. Placing the pollen grains in water, he saw through the microscope that they were ‘very evidently in ...”

“... the year Clarke returned to Ireland, a book called Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement, by Sir Robert Anderson, a police commissioner, was published – it helped inspire Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. The relevant passage was an account of a conversation between Gladstone’s home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, and a police chief. While Clarke was ...”

“... Brontë was not yet 21, she submitted a sample of her work to the reigning poet laureate, Robert Southey, together with a letter in which she apparently confided her ambition ‘to be for ever known’ as a poet. Three months later, Southey replied. Though he acknowledged her gift and encouraged her to continue writing ‘for its own sake’, he also ...”

“... Wren, came along at exactly the moment when he had fully mastered the ‘High Game’. But, as Robert Grant Irving’s fascinating study in the architecture of politics and the politics of architecture makes abundantly clear, there was far more to the making of New Delhi than the design of the buildings. His narrative is dominated by political events ...”